"your thoughts become your world" (YTBYW)—an ensemble of more than 500 paintings— begins with multiplicity. As soon as you have seen just a few, you cannot help but notice relationships between them, even as each one remains distinct. And as you see more of them, you know that there must be even more to see, as more relationships and more distinctions come into play. And yet the unfolding of these resemblances and singularities never seems random or infinite
As you move from one painting to the next, comparing and contrasting, you have to remember what you have seen and anticipate what might come next. If you are honest, you will not jump to the conclusion that everything looks alike, or that all the differences are trivial. Likewise, giving the work your careful attention is a matter of justice: only then will you see that the paintings do not simply relate to each other, they are thinking about each other, and it is your task to let it happen. To be more precise, the paintings think about each other (and everything between them) that is expressed in sensuous and abstract terms at once. They ask each other about their own potentialities, they examine their disparities from every angle, they render all relations of force reversible, and they patiently resist any closure of their horizons. They do not illustrate this sense of equality, they enact it.
The title of the project needs to be read in both directions at once, because all the action is happening around the word "becomes." For philosophers, "becoming" is not only a concept of change; it defines existence itself as change. "You must change your life" says Rainer Maria Rilke; "you must change the world," says Karl Marx, and both may be right. But in between them there are many paths, some of them leading toward and some leading away from whatever counts as "you." In the thick of this traffic, the customary stable reference points (such as "self," "society," and "environment") have been suspended, and it is necessary to orient ourselves according to a more dynamic set of coordinates. What does that look like? What does that feel like? Schwenk's project shows us one way to answer these questions. That is not to say that the project does not also address the great questions of the day—the daily threats to our existence, racial and sexual oppression, global ecological crisis—on the contrary, it insists that such questions can be approached through the effort of learning how to recognize and anticipate the irreducible multiplicity of relationships that are right there in front of us, staring us in the face. It is up to you to take a look.
Extract from "Abstraction and Justice: Sylvia Schwenk, "your thoughts become your world" (2020-ongoing)
